Various applications, such as gaming applications, may use multiple displays to increase the area over which visual information may be displayed. That is, a group of monitors may be arranged to form a single large surface that can display a partitioned image. The ability to drive multiple displays is beginning to allow a number of new display combinations. Such existing combinations include any combination of “cloned” displays, where more than one display shows the same desktop, and extended displays, where each display contains a different desktop. Other modes are also enabled by the driving of multiple displays, such as modes sometimes called “Very Large Desktop” (VLD), and Stretch mode or Span Mode. VLD for example, allows two or more displays to display a single desktop, and utilizes two or more GPUs coupled to the rendering ability of one GPU to drive the two or more displays (i.e. 4, 6, 8 or more). Stretch or Span Mode allows two displays to display a single desktop using a single GPU. Some existing products enable up to three displays to operate in concert.
When a display is cloned or duplicated there is no need to physically arrange the displays as both displays show the same image. When multiple displays are in an extended mode they can be arranged in the operating system control panel to place the desktops relative to one another. For the simpler Span Mode and Stretch Mode solutions it was relatively easy for a user to arrange the physical location of the display, or configure the software to swap the relative positions of the display, because there were only two displays involved. With VLD modes, the end user is responsible for physically repositioning the displays (or changing the display connections) to achieve the correct display arrangement. This is an inconvenient and time consuming problem. If multiple displays are associated with a single desktop, and as the number of displays and the complexity of the potential arrangements increases, it becomes necessary to provide methods to assist in configuring the physical arrangement of the displays. That is, as the number of displays being used in concert increases to four or more displays, the number of incorrect combinations that can occur with respect to the physical arrangement of the displays is large, and therefore a user needs assistance in arranging the displays.
However currently, in order to create the correct arrangement of displays, the user must physically move the displays to the proper physical position and/or change the cabling arrangement of individual displays to create the desired arrangement. This procedure is currently used when setting up a plurality of displays to operate in VLD modes.
Therefore a need exists for methods and apparatuses to configure the physical arrangement of a group of displays participating in a single large surface.